Dragon Soul Press took the opportunity to interview L.N. Hunter, an author featured in A Death in the Night.

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Besides my comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, I’ve written short stories for anthologies such as Best of British Science Fiction 2022 and Hidden Villains: Arise, as well as several issues of Short Édition’s Short Circuit and the Horrifying Tales of Wonder podcast. I’ve
also had papers in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, which are probably somewhat less relevant and definitely less entertaining. When not writing, I occasionally masquerade as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along
with two cats and a soulmate.

1. What prompted you to begin writing?
   • Although I’ve always been an avid reader, an interest in creative writing snuck up on me totally
     unexpectedly. Quite some time time into a career as a software developer, I decided to
     undertake a distance learning Psychology degree (not totally out of the blue—it did have some
     relevance to work). One of the examples used in the phenomenology segment of the course
     was an in-depth description of someone’s experience in a market, a record of a mundane
     activity, but engrossing in its detail. For some reason, that resonated with me—not in terms of
     psychological study, but simply for the idea of creating stories, so I investigated writing further
     and picked up a pen myself…
2. Do you have a favorite story or poem you’ve written? What’s it about?
   • So cruel to limit me to just one! There’s the time travelling cats story, and then there’s the
     sweary donkey protesting at being thrown out of his nice cosy stable a couple of thousand years ago because a certain person needed to be born there, not to mention the one about the
     woman so fed up with her husband’s snoring that she attempts to kill him, but it backfires and
     she ends up a ghost trapped with his racket forever.
     Anyway, dismissing all those, rather than settle on a single, complete story, I think I have to go with my favourite characters from my novel, the Humble Monks. They noticed that other
     religions’ striving to get closer to their gods doesn’t seem to bring huge benefits, so they operate on the principle of staying away from theirs, living underground instead building towering temples. In fact, their deliberate avoidance of their god means they don’t even know how to refer to Him, or possibly Her, or maybe Them. Here’s one of the few Humble Monk prayers that has ever been written down:
     O, Great Lord—or Lady, for We Do Not Know,
     We are not worthy of Thy Attention.
     We are insects. No, we areth less than that. Parasites on insects, verily,
     Remaining far distant from Thy Being, or possibly Beings,
     So as not to cause offence in Thy Gaze.
     Not that we merit an acknowledgement within Thy Sight.
     Of Thee, we beseech nothing,
     For we deserveth not even of the scrapings of Thy Boots,
     If, that is, Thou wearest Boots and not, say, Sandals or Flip-flops,
     For we desire not to maketh assumptions on Thine Apparel.
     Or anything else.
     (Silliness appeals to me—humorous situations or characters, or odd twists. For example, in my
     A Death in the Night story, an assassin discovers that his target is Time itself.)
3. How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about one.

1. My current main project, a comic fantasy entitled The Djinn and the Moonflower, is a sequel to
   The Feather and the Lamp. This time, Imperceptibility Happenstance discovers that something is invading the universe from another dimension, and she has to get to the moon (with the help of dragons, magic, distinctly odd science, and a djinn) to save everyone. I’m aiming to finish it
   this year, and a third book will follow, but I’ve not thought about that properly yet.
   I’ve got another couple of novels in outline or partial first draft stage which I’ll complete once Moonflower is done: a middle grade horror story and a techno thriller. (Yeah, I haven’t worked out what ‘my genre’ is yet). I’m also working on a stream of short stories, as the ideas come to me.
2. What is your writing process like?
   • Disorganised! I aspire to setting aside specific time for writing, and to clearly separate writing
     from editing and all the other activities a writer needs to do, but I haven’t managed to discipline myself to do any of that properly. Instead, I write when the muse belts me on the side of the head, while letting myself get distracted by all sorts of shiny things.
     Progress on my novels is slow because if some idea that has nothing to do with the novel
     lodges in my head, I have to spend time writing it down and exploring its edges to get the
     damned thing out of the way—and that’s where a lot of my short stories come from.
3. Where do you draw inspiration from?
   • Anything that catches my eye: news headlines (with elections looming in various countries at
     the time of writing, I do have a few almost certainly unpublishable political satires sitting on my
     computer), or things I see when I’m out and about—cobwebs at a bus stop inspired a sci-fi story about spiders ruling Earth in secret. Talking about buses, a guy I encountered on my commute one day became the lead in a serial killer story which will be appearing later this year—so take care what you might be doing in public in case I’m watching! Another thing that serves as a source of inspiration is other people’s writing: for example, I’ll wonder what might happen if characters like theirs did something else, or what if someone else was dropped into the same situation.
4. Who is your favorite author / what is your favorite book?
   • My favourite author has got to be Terry Pratchett, and my favourite book is Pyramids. The two
     things that tickled me most about that novel were the greatest mathematician in the Discworld, a camel who uses his intellect to calculate the direction of his spit, and someone who accidentally gets their time and space directions twisted, such that he continually drifts to the left and has to be propped against a wall to avoid him becoming lost.
     Terry has been a huge influence on me, and I was over the moon when one Amazon review for The Feather and the Lamp compared it to his writing.
5. What is one goal you have for your writing future?
   • Riffing off my lack of discipline, I don’t think I have a goal any more significant than to keep
     writing. I’d love to see some of my work appear on the big or small screen, but that’s more of a
     dream than an actual goal.
6. What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?
   • I want to entertain people—surprise them, make them laugh (or at least smile), or when writing
     horror, feel somewhat disturbed. Sometimes make them think, but not too hard—reading should be fun. I definitely don’t want people to be bored by my writing.
     (If anyone does find something I’ve written boring, let me know via the links below—in fact, get
     in touch if you have anything to say about my scribbles, or post a review on Amazon.)
7. Where can readers learn more about you?
   • LinkTree is a shortcut to everything, including Facebook and Amazon.